POLICING THE ‘IRRELEVANT’: CLASS, DIVERSITY AND CONTEMPORARY POLICE CULTURE

Abstract

Using ethnographic material derived from an in-depth study of contemporary police culture, this chapter explores a contradiction which emerged between the police’s organisational emphasis on diversity and axes of class. While efforts aimed at changing police culture both within and beyond the organisation focused on notions of equity, discrimination and diversity, it was predominantly poor and low-status white males who occupied a central position in the police’s practical workload, and in their occupational consciousness. Taking class contempt as a relatively unexamined aspect of police culture, this chapter raises questions about the place of class in current ‘policing diversity’ debates. The incremental slide away from [class] is marked as more than an economic retreat, it is also a retreat from regarding the white poor as ‘people like us’ – the white moral majority population. (Haylett, 2001, p. 358) Police Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 8, 181–204 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(07)08007-4